Tuesday, 24 November 2009

Lesson 3 of my toolkit looks at the impact of a road closure on a settlement.

It is based on the closure of the road below Mam Tor near the Peak District settlement of Castleton.

At a session in Gloucester yesterday, I talked about the connection with the settlements in Cumbria which have been affected by the closure of bridges following the unprecedented rainfall in the area over the weekend. There is lots of potential here for exploring the impact of sudden change, and the long term nature of that change...

I have uploaded an old resource of mine which I developed for use around the same time, but which didn't make it into the toolkit.

This is a "most likely to" activity based in the same area of Castleton in the Peak District. I used this extract numerous times throughout my teaching career, and it found its way into many a textbook and mapskills task...

Monday, 16 November 2009

Lesson 9 and 10 has a starter movie made using music from a band called Suns of the Tundra. The music is a specially provided instrumental mix of a track from the album 'Tunguska', called 'Capricorn Gone'

This is a rather cool band as they feature a GEOGRAPHER as singer and lead guitarist, in the shape of Simon Oakes.

The music is used with kind permission of Suns of the Tundra / Shiny Mack Records Copyright 2006, and in particular to Simon Oakes for producing the music for me.

Check out the band's MY SPACE page for more. New EP now available.....

The lesson is a "double lesson" task, which involves preparing for a job with a company called Milford Vista Tours.

At the top of the blog post is a "bonus resource": a letterhead / logo for the tour company. More additional resources to be added to this blog. Keep coming back for more...

Thanks to Paul Cornish for another interesting tip-off.This time to a GHOST FOREST.

Ghost Forest is an original and ambitious project by Angela Palmer that seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. It involves taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana. The tree stumps will be presented as a “ghost forest” firstly in Trafalgar Square in London, and then in Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in December.

Sunday, 15 November 2009

"The Times" this Saturday named Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" as the book of the decade. I have no problem with that nomination: this is an incredible book, and the plot and setting are utterly compelling.

Not sure what to think about it being made into a film. The trailer is HERE: film opens tomorrow in the USA.

There has been much discussion about the setting, and comparing it to real places, and plotting the route that the father and son take....

The descriptions of the post-apocalyptic landscape are bleak and unremitting, but also entirely convincing...